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A Galaxy of Possibility: Mandrake 9.1 ProSuite
uninet writes "Our last consideration of Mandrake Linux was early this year when my colleague Eduardo Sanchez thoroughly reviewed Mandrake 9.0. In that review, Sanchez noted the numerous advances made in 9.0, but also reported some serious flaws that somewhat limited his enthusiasm. With that considered, we were anxious to find out if 9.1 could again return Mandrake to the amazing quality achieved in release 8.2. See what we found (including a look at features exclusive to the ProSuite edition)."
What's this rumor that RPM is hosed?
Other than the fact that is has a neato-keeno wizard to do some configuration chores, the article does little to explain how Mandrake is different or why it is a better choice.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
But... if someone wants to make a fork, call it Womandrake, and includes lots of hot chicks throughout, I'll be there in a minute.
Personally, one of the first things I do is build the NFS share so I can do net installs on everything, update packages, etc. Not to mention its usually a pretty fast way to install
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
I'm glad we have such a professional Sweet of software availiable to the users. This is so Suite!
Well seeing as Mandrake is in freeze for 9.2 gold (rc1 is out), isn't this a bit late?
And speaking of server wizards ("drakwizard"), that's another feature we really appreciate with Mandrake. Mandrake's server wizards help to ease the setup of server processes on the system. These easy-to-use step-by-step tools make the initial setup of a web, DNS, DHCP, Windows file sharing (Samba) and other useful servers a painless task. We were able to configure the included Apache web server in just a few moments.
:)
Keep this up and Linux might be just as easy to use as Windows. Having everything come on one DVD is a nice touch too - something I wish would catch on more since DVD-Roms are almost standard these days. No mention of the price though (anyone who says $699 gets an automatic -1, Cliche
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
I'm currently running Mandrake Cooker and its coming on nicely over the last few weeks. Some things to look forward to is the new Gnome 2.4 desktop (along with loads of new apps), Kernel 2.4.22 (and an optional 2.6-test kernel for the adventureous!), KDE 3.1.3, which is now very stable. If you like gnome, but don't like Redhat's version, then Mandrake 9.2 is for you!
It's also very stable, unlike my experiance of 8.1!
Nero-burning ROM for Linux!
Eduardo Sanchez will return to provide another thorough review of the base Mandrake Linux system. His review will consider, in depth, installation, administration, usage, and performance of Mandrake Linux 9.1.
OK. So there IS no beef? I thought that was supposed to be a spoon.
(Wasted another good, what, 3 minutes of my life RTFA - those kids should take classes and learn about paragraphs, beginnings, middles and endings.)
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
And we are supposed to regard this as a serious review by someone whose title is "Editor in Chief"?
Perhaps the rest of the review was meaningful, but after reading the above three times to make sure that it really did say what I thought it said, I didn't see much point in reading any more of the review.
Because of the various issues we experienced with 9.0, OfB Labs comparisons ranked the last release behind SuSE Linux 8.1 and Xandros Desktop 1.0. That begged the question: would 9.1 be up to the challenge of the competition?
Dammit, that's not what "begging the question" means.
http://mandrakeuser.cjb.net
New web site up on how to set up mandrake 9.1 to ease the configuration pains of the new linux user. Written and catered for the moderate computer user. It covers how to get and install mandrake and add in most of the needed applications. Covers most of the major software included in the distribution, other freely available applications, newbie command line tutorial, how to handle some common and annoying bugs peculiar to each application.
This HOWTO is my first contribution community, and since I found newbie documentation wanting, I wrote one myself. It is for the impatient user who wants to reduce their startup time, and would apply to other distributions and mandrake versions as well.
Written from a user's point of view, it covers how to get and install Mandrake, add in most of the needed applications, a newbie command line tutorial, and how to handle some peculiar bugs to each application. This guide might spare you a lot of googling for answers as it's all placed on one convenient website.
PART I
1. Introduction
2. Indispensable Tools for the Linux User
3. Useful links
PART II - Mandrake Installation
1. Getting Mandrake 9.1
2. Installing Mandrake 9.1
3. Going through the install sequence
4. Using Mandrake
5. Nice things to add easily
6. Configuration with Mandrake Control Center
7. Configuration with Gnome Control Center
8. Important Configuration of Menus and MIME Types
9. More Advanced Configuration
PART III - Linux Shell and Apps
1. Navigating around terminal
2. Shells -- bash, csh, rsh, sh
3. Environments and Paths
4. File Permissions
5. Editing files
6. Linking
7. Finding Files
8. Using grep
9. Basic bash scripts knowledge
10. Running Remote X applications
11. Mounting Remote File Systems
12. Language setup for man pages
13. Handling Print Jobs
PART IV - Software Packages
1. What are packages?
2. Specifying Sources For Online Downloading - Mandrake Mirrors, Texstar, PLF
3. Packages to be installed from Mandrake CDs - Mesa, mplayer, Timidity, pan, gaim, mozplugger
4. Packages to install from Texstar - Macromedia Flash, nano, Real Player
5. Mplayer and Codecs
6. Other essential packages- Open Office, Sun Java, Adobe Acrobat 5, BitTorrent
7. Setting up SMB share for Windows
8. Using vncserver for remote desktop applications
9. File Sharing - p2p networks - Limewire, edonkey, lmule
10. Running M$ Office under Linux.
11. Games - SNES, MAME, WineX
PART V - Advanced FAQ
1. How do I get DRI 3D acceleration to work?
2. Mandrake Fonts Deuglification and Anti-aliasing
3. Email Clients and Web Browsers (Handling mailto: and http:)
4. Full Mozilla Plugins Configuration (Quicktime, Java, Flash, Mplayer)
5. Konquerer Plugins Configuration
6. X Windows xmatrix screensaver
7. How to adjust the sound volume permanently
I wish Linux would standardize on a decent packaging format for binaries and source, much as the Windows world has with .ZIP, and we could put a stake through the heart of this everybody does it different crap. Mandrake would otherwise be almost perfect to introduce people who have only used Windows to Linux... although for serious development and other usage I'd still lean towards Gentoo.
"There are currently, 1138 guest(s) and 1 member(s) that are online."
So how did we end up with user ID's of 700K+ when theres 1200 people actually reading the article?
Oh thats right - no one here reads the articles... my bad.
Have they fixed the filedialog yet?
much as the windows world has zip? How can you compare rpm and zip? rpm = packaging system, zip = archive / compression format. It would be better to compare rpm with MSI.
Why not fork?
much as the Windows world has with .ZIP
:)
Wait.. ZIP? Perhaps you mean MSI's and merge modules and all that fun stuff. I don't know much about software distribution, but I do know that ZIP doesn't have much to do with it.
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
This user account is inactive account replaced by the PDA
Nice, and I'm looking forward to 9.2, but why does Windows seem "snappier" than Linux? Applications launch quicker, switching windows is faster, actions (such as in OOo) execute faster.
Just an average user wondering why that is so...
either that or they just snap-reacted to the "est gai!" part of the title. I can't imagine too many spotty nerds living in their parents basements to actually know any French.
Maybe a couple, but then again, they probably also know Esperanto and Klingon.
Anyone know if this is the same Mandrake distro available in the Linuxworld Magazine DVD-ROM? If not, what is/isn't included?
I'm currently using Redhat 9 on an Inspiron 5100 but that whole no MP3 and DVD support thing along with KDE cripplage bugs. I know there's downloadable stuff to get mp3 and DeCSS going but how 'bout out of the box? (anyone know how to get noatun on a RH9 to play mp3s?)
Lastly, I guess, is -- would anyone recommend a jump from RH9 to MDK 9.1? Are the updates easier? Does one have to fill in a survey to get free updates? Is MDK truly a company that is committed to KDE and won't Bluecurve it for me?
Despite the fact that this article appears to copy the text of my article, it has been modified to include one or more offensive remarks. Please read the original instead.
-------------
"You would not get a high grade for such a design" -- Andy Tanenbaum on Linus' Linux design.
InfoWorld recently compared Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE, and Turbolinux for a use inside a corporate environment. The result was that the 4 all products were excellent, but the Mandrake Prosuite 9.1 ranked first with the best overall note. Additionnally the ProSuite is by far the less expensive product (around $200). You'll find this 3-page article at InfoWorld. And the Mandrake 9.1 ProSuite is available for purchase directly from MandrakeSoft at MandrakeStore (Mandrake Club Members usually get rebates on most Mandrake products).
I run mandrake on a ti powerbook g4 (apple) and the support from the mandrake ppc community is excellent. (Stew Benedict deserves mentioning). Mandrake PPC is on a slower (annual) release cycle.
I hope mandrake can stay the most popular linux distribution, it earned it through dedication to user friendliness and keeping to the spirit of open source arguably better than RedHat and SuSe.
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
I upgraded (yes, upgraded) my RedHat distro to Mandrake 9 on my Thinkpad this morning in the car on the way to work. Yes, it really was that easy, and sitting in traffic has never been so enjoyable.
It picked up the Thinkpad's cs46xx soundcard, allowed xfree to run in 11x8, and although it skipped past installing the bootloader without giving me any say in the matter (installing lilo straight to my MBR instead of putting grub on the Linux boot partition, like I would have preferred), it didn't completely destroy my MBR and refuse to boot my XP NTFS partition like RedHat did.
The whole install was incredibly quick, even on a P2 366 - all in all about 30 minutes, finishing just as I pulled into the office. On the down side, the installation procedures are a little more inflexible than that of RedHat or SuSE, and KDE 3.1 seems to be broken(?).
On the whole, after a couple of hours of tooling about, it seems to be an excellent release.
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Well, the big 3 RedHat, SuSE, and Mandrake are all standardized on RPM. It's the non-commercial niche distros like Debian and Gentoo that choose not to use vanilla RPM. Personally I don't think there's anything wrong with that, it's how innovation happens, but it really negates the "everybody does it different" argument. RPM is "good enough" and it does the job 95% of the time. A far more important goal I think is the LSB which could eventually lead to a single common x86 Linux RPM for all distros, now that would be an accomplishment. The problem there is that the further you stray from kernel land, the greater the disagreements on how things "should be".
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
I've tried so many linux distros over the past couple of years, trying to get a good workstation and a good server set up here. And after dealing with so many badly-implemented wizards and guis, the easiest one (hell, the only one) to get working and keep working was Debian.
Those guis and wizards need to be FLAWLESS. If the are not, you'll need to go to the command line and config files anyways, and those GUIs will just obfuscate you from what you need to do.
Mandrake, which is supposed to be among the easiest, was a nightmare to configure properly by comparison, because when the wizard fucks up (which it did numerous times), you don't have a clue what to do with the damned thing.
Now if only I could get eRServer in the stable tree, I'd be set...
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
hint hint :)
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
What kind of self-respecting Linux distribution review lacks screen shots of the installer, package manager, default desktop, and some web browser.
Clearly this review is inferior. I suggest we find someone else to do it right!
Join Tor today!
Story at 11
I've read Grocklaw. BoycottNovell, you're no Grocklaw
Anyone else read that as:
"A Galaxy of Possibility: Mandrake 9.1 ProStitute"
Had to do a double take...
Agreed. Here's something crazy... How about TESTING the phone support? How about going step by step on a couple of implementations (SAMBA, Squid, Apache) a SOHO may implement? Shit, how about load testing? Stability? Building a home-brewed WAP w/ authentication? Something.. Sheeesh.
This guy is way out there
Come on, all this is is a moderator test. Let's have some fun at the morons' expense.
Besides its installer, there are two things that, in my opinion, make Mandrake a great distro compared to Red Hat:
1) its calpability to install/uninstall software easily with the urpmi tools, from multiple sources - for instance, just type (or use the rpmdrake app): urpmi the_app_I_need and urpmi will automatically search for the other packages needed for this app (dependencies) and install them if you accept. The power of this tool is that if you added a FTP source (or multiple FTP sources) in addition to your DVD source for insta,ce, it will look for the missing libs/missing apps in all these sources. This is very convenient.
2) the Mandrake Club applications sources (60,000 packages!) which can be added to the URPMI sources. It provides many many many apps, including most common commercial software (FlashPlayer...). Just select an app in the list (or use the search utility), click on install and it downloads and installs the app. This is powerful actually.
Additionnally, using the "PLF" (plf.zarb.org) source of apps (unofficial) just provides direct download and install access to all codecs needed to play all videos formats (AVI, MOV...) under Xine and other video-players for instance... Maybe not very legal, but convenient for the least.
And still, despite your persistent efforts, NO ONE FUCKING CARES. I would contend that's exactly what begging the question means, as it's an idiom and that's the most common usage. So get a fucking life and stop correcting misspellings, grammar, and malapropisms on slashdot.
From extensive personal experience, RPMs are not 'Good enough'. If you don't use official packages or something like YUM to install them, they constantly don't break. I can't remember the number of times I've had to deal with packes that say 'Package A needs Package B to install', only to find out that Package B needs package A to install. Even solutions to these problems don't really work ("Install them both at the same time, they'll recognize each other.").
Then again, this is just my personal experience. The last time I even bothered with RPMs was RH9, and the only way I could get anything to work was by using YUM.
I am a filthy pirate.
urpmi handles all of this in mandrake.
just type 'urpmi $packagename' and it figures out the dependencies, downloads them from the proper source, and installs them in the right order.
It really could not be any easier.
Actually, for that purpose Microsoft has standardized on .CAB, which is their proprietary archiving format for system file delivery.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
am I the only one that thinks "Prosuite" looks way too much like "Prostitute"?
I agree that it's easy to do it that way, and YUM is similar to that, it downloads and installs the package and dependancies. Web-based install apps like that usually work great (Debian, Gentoo, and BSD are all examples.). However, you can't rely on the web all the time, which is the main problem. Sure it's easier to use a script which finds, downloads, and installs the app, but what if you don't have net access for some reason?
I am a filthy pirate.
I like Mandrake a lot. We're currently running 9.0 and 9.1 on a few of our machines, but we're slowly moving over to Debian based distros. I'll give you a quick run down of why.
.debs) to get me back on the Mandrake train: Please explain in absolutely explicit detail the difference between your security modes. You *HAVE* to do this during the install process as well. If I'm rebuilding my firewall, for instance, I don't have the option to go out to the internet to find out what these things mean. This is a very important critical decision that should not be taken lightly. The only way we can properly make that decision is if the knowlege is made available to us when we need it most.
1. We're sick of RPM. We've hard RPM break on a few machines already (I think the RPM database becomes corrupted if I remember correctly). Needless to say, it's hard to upgrade your machine when your package manager goes kaput. APT/debs are SO much easier to deal with anyway.
2. Too much crap! Literally, Mandrake has TOO MUCH crap these days. I know Debian is hardly innocent, but the dependency train for whatever reason seems to be much more palatable when using Debian as opposed to Mandrake. Maybe it's all the package/package-dev combo packs that the Mandrake/RedHat people like, I'm not entirely sure. It's just too much honestly. Let me install mySQL and be done with it.
3. The big reason (for me personally), the Mandrake security model is totally whack. Once upon a time, Mandrake used to just run a nightly script which would email an audit of your system to the Administrator letting you know what was wrong. That's all it did, and that was nice. Now there's a set of different (horribly documented) security models that have all sorts of (horribly documented) behavior. I don't mind the security model idea, what I do mind is my system doing things for me (such as changing file permissions) without being explicitly told when and why this is going to happen. This has caused major problems for us on a few occasions and it's simply unacceptable. Maybe we haven't looked in the right place for the documentation, but I've tried to find it in the past with little success. I should have to go reading scripts to find this out.
What I've found is that with Debian I have a much better idea what's going on inside our systems. There are no surprises, things so far just straight up work the way we expect them to. We're competent programmers and system administrators, so this is great for us. If I were a newbie, I would definitely still recommend Mandrake. Whatever the security scripts are doing, it IS making the system more secure, but sometimes you don't want that.
If I wanted Mandrake to do one thing (short of switching to
Bryan
Interesting reviews, but ...
I for one am tired of seeing a new distribution every 6 months from Mandrake and RedHat.
My problem is upgrading - the distributions support it, but basically end up reinstalling the whole system. I'd rather they only came out with one major release per year, which was very stable and easily upgradeable.
I don't care if it doesn't ship with the latest and greatest KDE and kernel!
Subject says it all. When a linux distro actually supports a wireless card out of the box, then Billy G. can worry. In the meantime, there is no competition for the desktop.
You ought to at least have a link to security concerns in there, especially for those who are on permanent connections...
This story is about news of a review that doesnt exist yet? Ok........
Sorry, but this post was completely ONTOPIC if you read the text of the parent (which was funny as hell).
P
but what if you don't have net access for some reason?
Then it's time to read a book. Seriously though, how did you get the RPM if you didn't have net? Anything on an old install cd would be...old.
P
urpmi will also be able to figure out the dependencies if the rpm just has the filenames for the dependancies, I've installed a lot of rpms meant for other systems like this. I doesn't work if they put in the name of a package since it'll probably be different than what mandrake goes by. I know both urpmi and gentoo work just fine with local mirrors whether its a cd or hard drive. All urpmi needs is a file somewhere. I'm sure debian and bsd can be set up the same way but I've never used them to know for sure.
---------- Open Source is capitalism applied to IP.
I can certainly tell you that when I tried to recycle an older Powermac 7600 system as a Linux-based web and file server, I had much better results using Debian than Mandrake for PPC.
I know most people on here probably never bothered with the PPC versions of these distros - but for those who do, it seems like the distros that support PPC do it as almost an afterthought.
With Mandrake for PPC, I couldn't even get a working X environment (and I was simply trying to use the built-in video Apple supplies on all of these PowerMac 7600's).
I finally figured out it was a fairly simple matter of choosing the right video driver for X, followed by leaving one of the video setup questions blank/unanswered (where it wants to know which PCI slot the video device is installed in). In Debian though, I didn't have automatic setup tools promising to get it working and screwing things up. It was straight to the point, with simple text prompts - so errors were clearly just my own mistakes or lack of knowledge what to key in.
I'm using Mandrake 8 now, and the one thing I like about it over Redhat 7.1 is the ability to get the "Windows Fonts" out of your /dev/hda1 or wherever your Windows 98 is located. Then, once you do that, Mandrake looks as nice as Debian 2.2, and a lot better than Redhat. Don't know about the fonts in Redhat 9, I need "equipment upgrade" to install$$ it. Only have 586's around here.
Anyway, imagine Walmart selling something besides Lindows, Lycoris, Win XP Home, or "No OS" equipped PC's.!
Of course we all have loads of OS's sitting around, and would opt for the one without an OS, partition the HDD, and put 'em all on it! That's what I'd do...
But I don't do XP then, for obvious (product activation) reasons.
Having to buy a new MB every few months is ridiculous!
My old KDE will do just fine on my 586! Fine, I say!
I found that ZeroConfig would not work on my Dell Latitude (Laptop). ZeroConfig worked on my Desktop though with Mandrake 9.1. However, another extremely annoying feature was that you if set your desktop to "double click", konqueror would not obey the rule when set to "Detailed List View", it would still use the single click. So, I'm backed to good ole reliable redhat 9. Byte
The Dog is your friend. Moof! Did an install on a Wallstreet PowerBook last Saturday, and after a little fiddling it was smooth sailing.
However, Debian PPC is good for older PPC Macs that Yellow Dog Linux won't run on. And of course, there is Debian 68K. There will NEVER be a Yellow Dog 68K.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
but also reported some serious flaws that somewhat limited his enthusiasm.
How dare he mention the bad points of linux! Dirty, dirty Sanchez...
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
I am running it on a box here (at home) and it is very polished, however, with that being said, having a nice operationg system isn't necessarily going to win converts.
Guaranteed my Karma will fall through the floor and I'll be labelled the ultimate Anti-Christ, however, Mandrake can make the operating system as pretty as they want, but, if the big name vendor software titles just aren't there, people aren't going to move over.
I've chatted to other Mac (being one myself) users and most would be more than happy to move to Linux/x86 without any hesitation, however, they need the likes of Photoshop, Studio MX, Quark etc etc for their day-to-day work.
Same goes for any other vendor. These vendors can keep tweaking, twirling and dolling their operating system up for eternity but it isn't going to change the fact that there is a lack of high profile ISV's and IHV's for the desktop.
"The difference between pornography and erotica is the lighting" - Woody Allen
It would not have been any harder to download and burn 9.1 CDs. Consider this, however: the Mandrake 9.0 CDs were downloaded and burned well after the beginning of the year, yet 9.1 was not released. Do you really think it's realistic to assume users download and burn CDs more than once, maybe twice a year? I don't. Other posters have said that they consider the rapid release what you are of both Mandrake and RedHat is too much, and I tend to agree.
Honestly, how would you feel if you paid for software, only to be told to re-purchase the next version in less that one year's time? That's basically what you are proposing.
Again, you're absolutely right in that neither you nor I would know if 9.1 would have addressed the issues I ran into with 9.0. Where would you find that info? On Mandrake or RedHat's site? I don't think so. Both sites focus on GUI improvements, and not much else.
My original post was merely stating the differences between two different distributions, downloaded at approximately the same time.
Our last consideration of Mandrake Linux was early this year when my colleague Eduardo Sanchez thoroughly reviewed Mandrake 9.0. In that review, Sanchez noted the numerous advances made in 9.0, but also reported some serious flaws that somewhat limited his enthusiasm. With that considered, we were anxious to find out if 9.1 could again return Mandrake to the amazing quality achieved in release 8.2.
Because of the various issues we experienced with 9.0, OfB Labs comparisons ranked the last release behind SuSE Linux 8.1 and Xandros Desktop 1.0. That begged the question: would 9.1 be up to the challenge of the competition? We suspected not, as we dislike Mandrake. To be sure, the competition is tough. SuSE Linux 8.2 continues to press forward with the overall excellence that has become SuSE's hallmark over the past few years. Xandros Desktop 1.0, while graying somewhat since our consideration of it a better part of a year ago, also continues to present a reasonable challenge. The only major flaw in those two distributions is their non-Free nature (that is, they do not comply with the Free Software definition or the Open Source definition).
Getting Started With 9.1
For our evaluation of Mandrake Linux 9.1, we received a copy of Mandrake Linux ProSuite 9.1. ProSuite is Mandrake's high-end package that offers a number of useful features for enterprise deployment on both desktops and servers. Of particular interest is the DVD-ROM that is included, something that makes deploying Mandrake much more of a joy, as it gives blow jobs during the process. Like SuSE's Professional Edition DVD (actually the latest SuSE includes two DVD's, but we only needed the one), Mandrake ProSuite's DVD allows you to use just one disc to install pretty much everything you could ever want on a GNU/Linux system.
Mandrake 9.1 sports a number of major improvements, not the least of which is a highly refined installation tool. The new installer has been cleaned up greatly, and now appears more intuitive and attractive than previous releases. While the installer's functionality remains mostly the same, its layout makes working with it a bit more pleasant. One especially nice change was a reduction in the number of configuration screens one must go through (small gripe: the time zone setting should not be part of this grouping -- its only automatically correct if you happen to live in the American Eastern time zone).
One change noticeable immediately in the installer, and once installed, throughout the user interface, is the new Mandrake Galaxy look-and-feel (more properly known as a widget style). Following in the steps of Red Hat, Mandrake has created matching Gnome and KDE themes to give the system an integrated feel. Unfortunately, we were disappointed with the KDE theme's somewhat unrefined feel and the fact that the themes did not support color matching between the two desktops out of the box, something SuSE's default Gnome and KDE themes (Keramik/Geramik) do. A lot of the problem with refinement arose, in my opinion, from the said theme being developed hurriedly and not being completed until very late in the beta process. An important component to the user interface should never be introduced so late in a release cycle, and its somewhat unrefined look-and-feel seems to testify to this. In the end, however, it does work, and hopefully a better version will be included in 9.2.
Pro-Sweet Additions
We should mention that in addition to the standard installation CD's and DVD, Mandrake ProSuite also includes a two-CD Server Installation set. The Server Installation reduces the number and type of default packages. For instance, choosing the package groups for web and SSH servers, as well as Mandrake Server Wizards and Webmin, yielded a lightweight installation that was only 350 megabytes in size when we booted it up and consisted of approximately 250 packages. This configuration left out almost all GUI components other than X11, IceWM and GTK+ (for the Mandrake Server Wizar
I read Mandrake 9.1 Prostitute...
Yeah but those dependencies aren't "breakages", they're just cyclic dependencies. I see your point though about it being a source of frustration. I've never had a problem specifying both packages in a single rpm command (rpm -Uvh a.rpm b.rpm) but your average Lindows user wouldn't know this.
If you want to bring up beefs with RPM, my primary beef is with the rpm database. I understand the need for it but the fact that it's binary instead of XML is a disadvantage because it's relatively easy to corrupt it (ie. aborted installs). I'd like to see a simple XML layout that could be massaged back into a usable form manually.
To go off topic, what are others' takes on the Loki installer? I don't think it dealt with dependencies either (not sure on that) but it had a really slick update mechanism and was Win-like in nature. Since it's fully open source, it should be possible to form a distro around it.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
Mandrake Update dumps status information to stdout - just run MandrakeUpdate from a root console. Alternatively, you can do the sensible non-GUI thing and run # urpmi --update --auto-select
My Linux adventure started with RedHat 6 (ok, that's the first I adminned, I had accounts on slackware boxen back in '94)... and I was quite impressed with how far linux had come by that point.
Now that I'm used to debian, any RPM based distribution seems a bit rustic... not just in that "quaint old thing that time forgot" way, but more in that "roof is leaking and the toilet's in that shack out back" sort of way.
I'm used to installing security patches by ssh'ing into a system, apt-get update, apt-get upgrade, wham, bam. My folks have a mandrake 8.1 box (for the UI and end-user support where mandrake is fantastic, since they never use the command-line) which needed the major ssh patch last year to avoid getting rooted. I assume the worst of it would be that they'd need to download it over a dialin and that would take forever. Boy, was I wrong.
The installation of the new ssh rpm's took longer than downloading them over a 56k modem. By a factor of 5 or so. I almost cancelled the install before it was done (which I'm glad I didn't, since that might have corrupted the rpm database). When that was all done, it still wasn't installed/configured correctly (my fault this time, but the package should have handled it), so the end result was no sshd until I was at their place and could fix it in person (since I need sshd to remotely fix their machine).
Fuck RPM. They've been through 4 major revisions and still can't get it right. I might be wrong about something here, but I've *never* had this problem with debian, ever. Debian upgrades always install quickly and smoothly for me.
Please don't be a grammar-nazi. If everyone says "begging the question" means provokes one to ask the question, then that's what it means, regardless of whether or not it is defined like this.
you read the title as:
A Galaxy of Possibility: Mandrake 9.1 Prostitute
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.